Daily Links

Intelligent design, she said, lost credibility and power in the 2005 trial in Dover, Pa., when a Republican-appointed federal judge ruled against teaching it in public school on the grounds that it was a religious idea and not a scientific one.

But there’s no fighting the Tennessee bill in court. “Creationists have learned a lot from getting their shins kicked for so many years,” Scott said. “They’ve learned to launder out all possible references to religion.”

Instead they use the term “critical thinking,” which should, in any logical world, lead people away from creationism.

Günter Grass, after offending the world by asking if the blanket bombing of Dresden at the end of World War II was humane, is at it again. Israel’s banned him from visiting there and has deemed him a “threat to world peace.” His offense? He wrote a poem that criticized Israel’s military aggressions toward Iran.

Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a declining American population (also longstanding concerns among the Quiverfull movement) should be fought by tripling the child tax deduction to encourage larger families. “We need to be a hopeful country that wants more children,” Santorum declared.

Did the Kony folks, Invisible Children, really provide intelligence to the Ugandan government? And the U.S.? WikiLeaks says yes.

Andrew describes Jesus’ ideas as “truly radical,” for example, “love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth.” His project is to convince us that these “radical” ideas are also “apolitical,” that when salvaged from the tangle of theological and political movements that have distorted them, they are something pure, spiritual and otherworldly. Like a good liberal individualist, he reads all of these virtues as a kind of private interior experience, something I’m not sure Jesus ever intended them to mean.

Last night I was on a panel with the likes of Amber Hollibaugh, Susan Gerbino and Ai-jen Poo, talking about the “Gender and Sexual Politics of End of Life Care.” I’ll post my talk here soon but in the meanwhile, go check out my co-panelists.

If you haven’t yet read the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 50-State survey of Prison Chaplains, run. It’s chock full of information about what religion looks like in prison.